#oneaday Day 742: Crash and burn

There is increasing talk of the video games industry staring down an honest-to-goodness crash — and this time around, unlike the notorious Great Global Video Game Crash of North America from 1983, it looks very much like it could be one that will happen across the world. All this said, I feel like, at this point, there is enough disparity between the bit that will be affected by it and the bit that will be able to continue on regardless for the latter to be able to survive comfortably.

dramatic fireball explosion with dark smoke — Photo by Edu Raw on Pexels.com

This will, in its own curious way, reflect what happened in 1983, where a significant portion of the game-playing world — the UK and Europe, notably — were blissfully unaware of the problems the broader games business were suffering, because they were enjoying the fruits of a thriving cottage games industry. Here in the UK, we had no idea a "crash" was happening across the pond because we were all cheerfully buying £1.99 Mastertronic tapes from our local corner shop.

Something's gotta give, though, because the relentless torrent of shit that is coming out from shareholder-beholden companies — particularly with regard to the odiousness that is generative AI — is completely unsustainable. And we've reached a point where all but the most ardent bootlickers are feeling more and more emboldened to criticise what's going on — though sadly this also coincides with a period where thousands of people are being laid off and games aren't actually getting any better.

Take this statement attributed to Sony, posted on Bluesky earlier today:

How AI evolves the PlayStation experience

• As AI lowers barriers to creation and increases the volume and diversity of content, the PlayStation platform and studios are expected to remain critical in delivering high quality experiences and helping players discover the right content in an increasingly crowded landscape.
• Within the studio business, AI powered tools are automating repetitive workflows and improving productivity across areas such as software development, quality assurance, 3D modeling, and animation, allowing production teams to focus on building richer worlds and gameplay experiences.
• Across the platform business, AI is driving efficiency, personalization, and customer value at scale, while continued investments in AI and machine learning are expected to push visual fidelity forward and deliver higher quality player experiences.
• Overall, AI is expected to unleash the creativity of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s studios, power a more curated and consumer-centric platform, and enhance the PlayStation experience, supported by its global player base, deep IP library, and integrated ecosystem.

This is a complete nothing of a statement! It says nothing! It gives precisely no examples of how AI "improves productivity", "drives efficiency, personalisation and customer value at scale" and "unleashes the creativity of Sony Interactive Entertainment's studios"! It is five paragraphs that explain nothing and say nothing, but which exist purely to, supposedly, placate shareholders who, apparently, have absolutely no functioning brain cells between them and desire nothing more than every stupid fucking company to follow every stupid fucking trend in existence, even when they are demonstrably, actively harmful and just plain shit!

I am mildly heartened that a number of developers are starting to speak up a bit more about this. There's a good piece on Aftermath on the subject, and another on gamesindustry.biz. There are still the annoying sycophants in every single comments section who all parrot the exact same lines about "the genie being out of the bottle" and "get used to AI or get left behind", but there is, I feel, increasing resistance to that side of things. A lot of smaller-scale developers are also making a good name for themselves by saying, out loud, and prominently, that they do not use generative AI at any point in their development process. Good!

The utterly dumbshit thing about corpos like Sony sucking Sam Altman and Wario Amodei's robophalluses is that there is not a single documented instance of a project involving generative AI being well-received by either press or public. I'm not even convinced that it's actually what shareholders want to see. The otherwise excellent Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was soured for a lot of folks (including me) when it was found that they had used generative AI for "placeholder" (sure) assets, and likewise for the apparently also very good The Alters. New projects coming out that are revealed to be using generative AI are subject to mass shunnings and censure from press and public alike — and rightly so. It is starting to feel less and less desirable to have any involvement whatsoever in the top end of today's games industry — a once-exciting, vibrant place — and more and more understandable when people choose to focus their time and attention on both small, independent projects and retro titles.

On top of that, the very generative AI that all these shareholder-appeasing corpos are rushing to use for no real specified purpose is becoming increasingly responsible for pricing people out of games and tech! No good having "volume and diversity of content" (ugh) if no-one can fucking afford the devices to play it on, is there?

All this can easily be avoided! We have been making games for a very long time without the use of a glorified Autocorrect trained on stolen data! I find it near-impossible to believe that every game developer has suddenly completely forgotten how to do things the way we've been doing them for many years at this point, just because you can tell "Claude" to churn you out some spaghetti code using conversational English. And yet. And yet.

I don't know exactly what a "crash" is going to look like in this instance, but I feel like it's not going to be pretty — and the potential knock-on effects concern me somewhat. Like, if games consoles go away — and with the current tech pricing situation, that's a real risk — what does that then mean for people who like to collect games, and for the long-term archival of games using physical media? There are so many potentially terrible things that could happen that I don't feel like the world of video games has adequately prepared for, and it's really quite worrying.

Still, if the worst comes to the worst, I have shelves full of games, many of which are complete-on-disc or complete-on-cart, and a fully-loaded MiSTer. I could, at this point, duck out of "modern gaming" at any time — and with each passing month, it feels more and more like I might end up doing that.

To pre-empt the inevitable comments from weirdly aggressive generative AI-boosting corpo bootlickers: fuck off; you are not welcome here, if the above doesn't make that abundantly clear already, and your comments will just be deleted, so you may as well just not bother. Hope that helps!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 741: The bubble

The thing people who have been fortunate enough to have never been afflicted with debilitating depression don't always understand is that the whole experience is more than just being "a bit sad", and thus it's not something you can just "snap out of" or "cheer up" from. (To be clear, those scare quotes are purely hypothetical; no-one has actually been disrespectful enough to declare my current feelings non-valid.) I suspect it's something that is different for everyone who experiences it, so today I thought I'd talk a bit about how I feel when I get like this.

a man in pink shirt with his head on a glass ball — Photo by Caique Araujo on Pexels.com

For me, it's like being inside a bubble of sorts. I can see the world going on around me; I can hear it; I can even interact with it. But I feel an almost total disconnect from it. It's like I'm on a slightly different plane of existence; reality kept at arm's length. Close enough to be familiar and still just about within reach, under most circumstances, but far enough away to making going about normal, everyday things varying degrees of "challenging", ranging from "begrudging reluctance" all the way up to "this feels like a completely insurmountable task that I will never be capable of". And the challenge factor doesn't necessarily relate directly to how difficult the actual task is; as an example, the simple act of talking to people I know and like right now feels very much like it's up around the "insurmountable" end of the scale. Not quite there, because I can just about carry on a conversation right now, but not something I am deliberately seeking out if I absolutely do not have to.

It can be disconcerting, and the description of it as a "bubble" is perhaps not the best one; bubbles, after all, are fragile, delicate things that can be popped at a moment's notice, while whatever encloses my mind at times like this is much more… solid-seeming. And it weighs you down; it drains the energy and vitality from your mind and body, and makes, as I say, just going about your regular, everyday business feel like an enormous effort; a toil that never ends.

And the worst thing is that being in this state is weirdly addictive. I recognise this about myself. I recognise that when I get into a state like this, something in my brain almost wants to remain this way, even though another little voice in my brain knows that it's unproductive and unhelpful, both to myself and to the people around me. It becomes a battle between different aspects of my consciousness, I guess; the more primal, emotional part of myself wants to continue to wallow in the darkness because there's a strange sort of comfort there, while what I would probably describe as the more high-functioning, pragmatic part of myself wants to tell me to… just do something, whether that's a simple thing like doing something enjoyable that might take my mind off things, or something more complex and long-term that might lead to some sort of solution (or at least resolution) to the problem I'm experiencing.

At the moment, the primal part is winning. I am right in the depths of that bubble, and normality feels a very long way away. I don't know if it's slipping further away or getting closer, either; the feeling changes from moment to moment. Sometimes I feel like I am just going to have to accept that Something Bad has happened and try to move on from it; at others, I feel like I described the other day, like everything has come to a screeching halt until this particular "episode" of my life has concluded in some fashion.

This is all very abstract I know, and I'm almost certainly mixing metaphors and whatnot. But this also just happens to be the sort of musings that dribble forth from my brain at times like this, as particularly longstanding readers of this blog will be well aware, I'm sure.

I have little doubt that I will eventually manage to make it through this particularly bleak period of my life one way or another; I have survived plenty of other episodes like this in the past, and I'm sure there are plenty more to come in the future. But right now, if I seem a bit off, or if I don't really want to talk, or you get the distinct impression I just want to be left alone… well, as I said the other day, it's probably not you, and it is most definitely me.

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#oneaday Day 740: Exhaustion

I am absolutely exhausted. We stayed up late last night to go on another night-time look for Oliver, and once again found absolutely no sign of him whatsoever. At this point I really am at a loss as to what I can possibly do. I bought bright head-mounted torches and an infra-red heat-sensing camera in the hopes that they will make it easier to see a cat hiding, but given that we have no idea which way he went or how far he's gone in the last two and a half weeks, it feels very much like finding a needle in a haystack, and the emotional exhaustion of simply not knowing if anything we are doing is actually worthwhile is very much manifesting itself as physical exhaustion.

person in black shirt lying on a white sofa — Photo by www.kaboompics.com on Pexels.com

This is one of those times where I feel like I need to have a word with my inner self, and say that it's okay to look after me. Oliver is important, and we desperately want to find him, but if the process of searching for him, worrying about him and generally running ourselves completely ragged is having an impact on our physical wellbeing, it's probably time to take a little break, at least for one evening. Patti is also sad, upset and clearly worried about us.

We have done everything that the people who copy-paste the exact same comments onto every single "missing pet" Facebook post suggest. We have put things that he likes and things that smell of him outside, we have put food outside (which, on separate occasions, got eaten by another neighbourhood cat, and attracted a fox), we have left open the window that we believe he escaped through, we have been out calling softly for him, we have sat out in the garden having a normal conversation so he can hear us, we have motion sensors on our security cameras set to notify us the moment they see an animal.

At this point my only real possible conclusions are that he is locked in somewhere and hasn't been found yet — which, with every passing day, makes me very concerned for his wellbeing; that he has been taken by someone, either because they saw a lovely cat looking lost and thought they'd take care of it, or because of more nefarious purposes, which I don't like to think about (but also feel is probably quite unlikely); or that he is no longer with us, in which case I feel like he probably would have been found by now.

I know I keep repeating myself, but hopefully my post yesterday makes it clear why. I do not feel like I can "continue" with my life while I don't know what has happened to my precious boy. And I'm worried that I am going to be left feeling like this for a long time. What if we just… don't hear anything at all? What then? Are we stuck in a perpetual limbo of hoping that he'll just make it home somehow, seemingly against all odds? Or do we attempt to make our peace with the situation, try and say as best a goodbye as we can in his absence, and try to move on?

I can't bring myself to do the last one. Not yet, anyway. I still feel like one evening, we're just going to see him saunter around the corner as if nothing happened. It does sometimes end up like this, and I am hoping that this is one of those situations. But with every passing day, it's harder to hold on to that hope.

I'm off to try and distract myself. Tonight I will be having a go at Adventure of Samsara, Atari's exploratory platformer that apparently has some connections to the 2600 version of Adventure. Hopefully it takes my mind off things for a bit at least.

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#oneaday Day 739: Occupying yourself while your life is on hold

If you're anything like me, when you encounter a period of great uncertainty or emotional turmoil in your life, it can feel like your brain has pressed a big old "pause" button, making it near-impossible to even contemplate going about your life as normal. Your job feels like the least important thing in the world, you feel like interacting with people in the way you usually would is the most tiring and difficult thing imaginable, and it somehow feels "wrong" to simply continue on with the things that you were doing prior to the aforementioned period of great uncertainty or emotional turmoil.

This is, inevitably, not particularly convenient or helpful, either for yourself or for people who are, for one reason or another, depending on you and your input into various aspects of their own lives, be it personal, professional or a bit of both. I unfortunately do not have a good answer for how to just "get over it" at times like this, since, as you have probably noticed from recent posts, I am slap bang in the middle of one such period right now. And I will doubtless continue to be so for quite some time. I apologise in advance to anyone I don't reply to, am rude to, have no patience for or for whom I am unable to complete a requested task. It's not you, it's very much me, but I do at least hope you have some understanding for what I am contending with.

One of the things I find most difficult about times like this is, as I talked about the other day, getting other people to understand the sheer depth of the things you are feeling, and how all-encompassing they can feel. I feel like not everyone's brain presses that big tempting "pause" button when something like this happens; some folks can, I suspect, handle things a lot better than I can. Or, no, that's perhaps not fair to myself. Some folks, I suspect, handle things differently to how I do. Regardless of self-deprecation, I envy them somewhat; the way in which they can allow their life to continue moving forward during times of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

Or perhaps they're just better at hiding it than I am. Perhaps they're feeling exactly the same as I do in private, but are better at "masking" the way they feel when they are around others. Putting on a brave face, stiff upper lip, that sort of thing — but breaking down in tears when they're off the clock, staring into space, feeling despair at simply not knowing what to do or how to feel.

At times like this, as I say, it can be difficult to engage with the things that would normally bring you joy, because sometimes it can feel like taking hold of a feeling of transient joy is somehow "wrong" or "disrespectful" to the thing you are uncertain, upset, sad or angry about — even if you know that it's a momentary distraction that you probably need for the sake of your own mental health. The other side of this is that when you're experiencing those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil, it can simply be difficult to focus on something that, under normal circumstances, would bring you joy, but requires a certain amount of concentration and engagement.

This is an exceedingly long-winded way of saying that I have not gone back to Final Fantasy XI since Oliver's disappearance, despite the fact that it was bringing me great joy, and would probably be an excellent distraction right now. But it just doesn't feel quite right to be going back to that just yet, which is what led me to reach for something from my shelf this evening that does not particularly require continuous concentration, focus and engagement — or, perhaps more accurately, demands a different kind of continuous concentration, focus and engagement; a kind that, when your brain is all a-churnin' with great uncertainty and emotional turmoil, you can still get along with.

For me, this is where video games that are entirely mechanics-focused come in. I am generally someone who prefers playing things with strong stories, but there are times when something that is pure mechanics is exactly what the doctor ordered. These types of experiences demand a different kind of focus to works that want you to concentrate on narrative, themes and characterisation, and they can make excellent distractions from periods of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

The absolute ideal form of this type of experience is something that, when you reach a "fail" state, you can jump right back into with minimal fuss, ad infinitum if necessary. In technical video game terms, the best implementation of this is a game where, when you hit a "Game Over" or equivalent, you can just press a button and be immediately playing again, ideally without any waiting around for load times or anything like that.

This evening, I have been playing some of the Atari Recharged games, which fit the bill perfectly for this sort of thing. I've had lovely boxed versions of these on my shelves for ages, but still haven't yet got around to exploring all of them fully. This evening, I have been playing Asteroids Recharged and Breakout Recharged, and they have very much been having the desired effect.

For the unfamiliar, the Atari Recharged games are modern reimaginings of classic Atari arcade games. The ones I have played all have the same structure: they have an infinite "arcade" mode, where you simply play to survive as long as possible and attain a high score, and a "challenge" mode, which consists of a large number of predefined, standalone, self-contained levels, each of which challenges you to accomplish a particular objective, often under difficult circumstances.

Both of these are excellent for calming the storm of a turbulent mind, as both function as I describe above: they demand concentration and focus without having to engage the part of your brain that deals with pesky things like words, subtext, narrative themes and characterisation, and they allow you to quickly and easily try again if you mess up. And you will mess up a lot more than you win — particularly in the arcade mode, where there is literally no way to win other than beating your own high scores, or those of people you have set your sights on from the online leaderboards.

In a way, they are "mindless", but I don't mean that in a denigratory way. There's something primal and instinctual that happens to you when you play games like this, and it leaves no room for abstract emotions. You'll feel enjoyment, satisfaction, frustration and even anger, but allow yourself to become one with the experience and you will, at least for an hour or two, forget about those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

It is important to give yourself an escape hatch; a lifeline. When your brain decides to put your life on pause, it often isn't healthy. It might cause you to not take as good care of yourself as you should. You might not eat properly. You might find yourself pushing away people who want to help — or at the very least want you to open up about what's wrong. It can be easy to immerse yourself in those feelings of great uncertainty and emotional turmoil; an all-encompassing, opaque black bubble of misery from which it can be very difficult to escape if you allow it to form completely.

So take those moments, as little and fleeting as they might be, and step out of that darkness for a moment. It's not a betrayal of the things you are upset about; it is allowing yourself a moment's peace, preventing you from being consumed completely, and perhaps giving you the strength to be able to pull yourself out of the mire, little by little.

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#oneaday Day 738: Spoiling Patti

Any time something bad happens involving a family member — and cats are family members, I will brook absolutely no argument on this front — it is easy to focus on that one member who is the focal point of whatever The Bad Thing is. In this case, the majority of our attention has, of course, been on Oliver, because we want nothing more than to see him back. But upon our return, we have been making a special effort to spoil our other cat, Patti, because not only has she had to deal with us being away for a week — and she doesn't like it when we go down to the shops, let alone go away for a whole week — she's had to do it with the disruption to her usual routine that comes with Oliver's absence. And Patti is very much a creature of habit.

Thankfully, as discovered by my mother-in-law, Agnes, who was looking after her while we were away (as well as looking out for Oliver on the chance he would return of his own accord), it is possible to establish a new Routine with Patti quite easily. It takes her a few days to become accustomed to the presence of Agnes — a process which always leads to initially begrudging and eventually enthusiastic acceptance of her as the temporary primary cat-caregiver — but by the time we come back they are always the best of friends.

This time around, Agnes was delighted to describe that she and Patti had established a new Routine for each day: Patti would spend each day either sitting on our bed or the windowsill, while Agnes would potter around in the garden and do all the tidying up we told her not to do while we were away, because she should be taking it easy. Then, when the evening came, Agnes would sit in my customary spot on the sofa in the living room, Patti would jump up, and Agnes would brush Patti. This became such an established Routine over the course of the last week that apparently on the one evening where Agnes did not follow this Routine, Patti went and fetched her from the other room until she got her nightly brushing to her satisfaction.

Patti is spoiled. She has been ever since we got her. She didn't have the best start in life, as she was apparently abandoned by her previous owners, and this led to her being a somewhat nervous, timid girl, especially around strangers. This, of course, led to us wanting to create the happiest, most safe-feeling home she could possibly have. She deserves it, we figured. Our hearts melted the moment we met her, and she has been the most wonderful companion ever since.

She will habitually run and hide whenever someone unfamiliar (or someone who simply hasn't been here for a while) comes into the house, but she is loving, tactile and very vocal with the pair of us. When we first met her at the local shelter, she was described as a "lovely girl" but "shy". What they didn't tell us — or they didn't know — was that those two things were not simple descriptors of her personality, but rather her two different, distinct modes. She is a lovely girl sometimes (with us), but she is shy at others (around strangers). I see the fact that her lovely girl side has only flourished over the years she has been with us as reflecting well on us as her caregivers — something which we would probably both do well to remember while we keep blaming ourselves for Oliver's disappearance.

So yes, although Agnes has gone home this evening, Patti has had her brush on the sofa. She knows something is wrong — how could she not, with Oliver's sudden absence, because Oliver absolutely adores Patti to a degree that she would sometimes rather he tone down a bit — but she has seemingly already come to the understanding that we are doing our very best to return things to normality as much as we can. I hope and pray that means we can return Oliver to her as soon as we can — but regardless of what happens, she is going to get even more love, care and attention than she already does. She is our little princess, and she deserves all the happiness in the world. I just want, more than anything, to reunite her with her annoying little brother, and for our family to be whole again.

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#oneaday Day 737: Returning to reality

We go home tomorrow, which is going to be somewhat bittersweet, as I'm sure you can imagine. There has been absolutely no sign of Oliver over the course of the last week, no contact from anyone who has seen him, no sightings reported on social media and — perhaps thankfully? — no reports that he has passed away. So I choose to believe that he is still out there, somewhere, just waiting for us to find him. Perhaps it's all a game to him. He does love a game.

grayscale photography of concrete road during daytime — Photo by Airam Vargas on Pexels.com

I am, of course, still absolutely sick with worry. It has been two weeks today that he went missing, and whatever happens, I am always, always going to be wondering if there was more we could have done — more we should have done. There are zillions of online resources out there saying what you "should" do when a cat goes missing, but a significant proportion of them appear to be AI-generated drivel and pseudoscience.

I am not willing to give up on him, though. At this point, it feels like it will be unlikely that he will come home by himself for whatever reason, but I still want to go looking for him and will be doing so when we return home tomorrow. I don't know if I will be able to achieve anything — over the course of two weeks, it's entirely possible he could have gone a long way, although most supposed "experts" (with the caveat above) seem to believe that cats who spend the majority of their time indoors, as Oliver did, won't have actually ventured very far, and are probably hiding silently somewhere they feel is "safe". This, unfortunately, makes them extremely difficult to track down; the most supposedly reliable advice appears to be to bring things that are "familiar" to them — things that they recognise the smell or sound of.

Part of me is concerned that he has simply been taken by someone. Not necessarily stolen as such, but perhaps he was seen somewhere, the owner didn't think to get his microchip checked, and now thinks that they have a wonderful new cat in their family. If that has happened, I have absolutely no idea how we would go about finding him — although if this has happened, his status will be flagged up if and when he is taken to the vets or a shelter or something, and that, in turn, would allow us to be reunited. But that, of course, depends on the person in question thinking to take him to a vet or shelter — if indeed this is the situation in which he has found himself.

As I've said repeatedly over the course of the last two weeks, though, the absolutely impossible thing throughout all this is just not knowing anything. What made him jump out of the window? Which way did he go? Was he just exploring, or was he running from something? Is he hurt? Is he hungry? Has he been taking care of himself for the last two weeks? Has someone else been taking care of him for the last two weeks? I don't have any answers, and these myriad questions swirling around my brain are driving me absolutely spare.

I'm supposed to be going back to work on Tuesday, and it'll be right back into a difficult, stressful time, too. Honestly I'm not sure I'm going to be able to cope. I am wracked with pain, sadness, guilt, anger, frustration and all manner of other emotions, and I still don't really know how to process any of them, or how to direct any of them in a vaguely productive direction — either for getting some work done, or for tracking down our precious boy.

As with any difficult time, I guess it's just going to have to be a "one step at a time" sort of situation. I want to think this is all going to end happily and become a funny story to share in the years to come, but I am also fearing the worst. I don't want to lose him. He is so, so precious to me.

There is nothing I can do from where I am right now, though. Tomorrow is a new day, and we can decide what we need to do from there. So the best thing I can probably do at the moment is get some rest and try to come to tomorrow as alert and refreshed as is possible under the circumstances.

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#oneaday Day 736: The sewage of social media

In the hunt for Oliver, I have been obliged to make use of two sites that I have, up until now, generally avoided using at all costs — those being Facebook and Nextdoor. And my experiences attempting to make use of them now they might actually be useful have not done much to change my mind about them.

pipe with sewage — Photo by Joseph Russo on Pexels.com

Both of them suffer from pretty much the same problems, and both are a result of the now well-documented phenomenon that is enshittification. In fact, it's almost uncanny how similar the two platforms' problems are — with the only real difference being that Nextdoor isn't trying to push AI-generated softcore porn "Reels" at me every five posts.

One of the main problems with both of these sites — and with a lot of other social media sites in general — is their insistence on providing a non-chronological feed of Stuff. Instead, they decide to surface relentless parades of absolute sewage that their mysterious "algorithms" believe are "Relevant" to you. In practice, what this means is that you get bombarded with a bunch of stuff that you don't give a shit about — often repeatedly. And the stuff in question is, more often than not, spam or outright scams.

On Nextdoor, for example, there's a post that is supposedly from an alcoholic person that keeps showing up in my feed despite my having shown no indication of any interest in it. I don't know what the point of the post is and I don't really want to know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's some form of advertising. Likewise, on Facebook, I'm continually confronted with "Suggested" posts that are very clearly adverts, but positioned in a way that is clearly designed to be incredibly deceptive towards those who aren't particularly Internet-savvy.

Then there's the notifications. Oh, God the notifications. Nextdoor is the worst for this by a significant margin. Given that the only thing I have posted on there is the request for people to look out for Oliver, one might naturally assume that the only notifications I might be interested in would be responses to that post. But no! Here's what my notifications look like as of this evening:

Last 7 days
Chris Peart: I'm fed up with parking, there is no consideration for people who use there drives!

15h
Claire Purdue joined about a km from you.

1d
Susan Coleman: To the irresponsible person who thought it was a good idea to leave a pile of dog poo...

1d

Karen Cousens: Anyone know what's going on with Lordswood Road? There are still signs up saying no...

2d
Emily Love: My brothers 2 cats have not been seen for a few days. Has anyone in the Bryanston...

4d

Beryl Macklin: Bin men just been . My garden bin was full but not over flowing or stuff caught in...

You will notice that none of these posts are anything to do with Oliver. You may also know that none of these posts are from people that I know. I'm not even convinced that they're all from people in the same area as me.

I get the intent behind this shit: the idea of Nextdoor is that it is supposed to build a community of neighbours, and one way of getting neighbours to recognise one another is to stuff them into each others' notifications, whether you want them or not. But this is not useful! The very point of notifications is so that you can get notified when something happens that you have been waiting to hear about! When you're dealing with a stressful situation like losing a pet, the last fucking thing you want is to see a notification pop up, think that someone might have a lead on your precious companion, only to find that it's someone who doesn't know which "there" to use whingeing about bin men or complaining about parking or some other such crap.

I don't have a great deal of faith that either of these sites are going to help us find Oliver. The one vaguely positive thing I can say in Facebook's favour specifically is that members of "lost pet" groups are proactive in resharing people's posts to other groups that you might not have joined yourself. That increases the visibility of your original post and, in theory, makes it more likely that it might cross the path of someone who might be able to help — although that, unfortunately, has not happened as yet.

Still, it's something, at least, and posting on these places is something that I can at least monitor while we're away from the house. It hasn't come to anything as yet, but it only has to come to something once for it to have been worthwhile. So I guess we'll have to wait and see — but I suspect once we get home, it will be back to searching for him ourselves and hoping, wishing, praying for his eventual safe return.

It's our last full day away tomorrow, and that will also mark two weeks since Oliver went missing. I still don't know how to feel, other than sad, upset and frustrated. But in a couple of days' time, we're going to have to at least attempt to move on with our lives as best we can in the meantime, and whatever happens from thereon, happens.

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#oneaday Day 735: Many distractions

We have both been feeling pretty upset today — like, breaking down in tears upset — so, during moments of clarity, we attempted to get out a bit and actually do some things rather than spending the entire day miserable. We actually ended up having a rather busy day as a result.

This began with our customary trip to the one restaurant we always pay a visit when we come to Center Parcs: The Pancake House, an establishment that, I believe, is fairly self-explanatory. They offer an excellent range of both sweet and savoury pancakes, and you can have each dish made with a large Dutch pancake, a stack of American pancakes, or an omelette if you're some sort of crazy person.

We both went for our usual orders: Andie had the apple and cinnamon crumble pancakes on Dutch, and I had the "New Yorker" (pictured), which is listed under "sweet" pancakes but is actually just a stack of American pancakes with bacon and (optionally) a fried egg, plus maple syrup. Very good.

After that, we weren't quite ready to return to the lodge and potential intrusive thoughts, so we went to go and play pool for a bit. I haven't played pool for a long time and have always sucked at it, but thankfully Andie also sucks at it too, so we had a fairly even best-of-three session. Andie ended up beating me 2-1, and it was deserved. I played well in my first game (which I won) and got pretty consistently worse with each subsequent game. My excuse is that it was hot and sweaty and humid in the pool hall, and I'm sticking to it.

Following that, we came back to the lodge to sit for a bit; I played a bit of Ace Attorney and Andie stared at a knitting project she's had trouble starting. Then we thought going for a swim would be a nice distraction; turns out that it was. A bit of time in the outdoor Sprudel pool and bubbly jacuzzi was nice and relaxing, then we went down one of the water slides, played in the wave machine for a bit, and then we were ready to head back and have some dinner.

All in all, although we're both still very sad and anxious, today ended up being about as nice a day as it's possible to have under the circumstances, and a demonstration of something that is always worth remembering during your bleakest moments: sometimes it pays to just get up, get out and go do something rather than staring into the middle distance being miserable about something which, at that exact moment, you cannot really do anything about.

Tomorrow we will still feel sad and anxious, I am sure. There will be many more tears before we get any sort of closure on this whole horrible situation, I am equally sure. But I will keep telling myself: it is important to continue to take care of yourself, as well as worrying about the wellbeing of those who are precious to you.

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#oneaday Day 734: Wildlife

One of the nicest things about Center Parcs is that there is an absolute ton of incredibly tame wildlife around the place. Just today, we have seen a wild cat, several deer, a variety of birds and a bunch of squirrels.

I will, of course, grant you that the reason the wildlife is so very tame is because it has been so thoroughly spoiled by the humans in this space — and I won't pretend that we are immune to such temptations. Not only that, I will not deny that it is probably bad for wildlife to become dependent on food provided by humans. But I prefer to look at it as these animals coming to live in harmony with the people who visit here; it's abundantly clear that they're all more than capable of taking care of themselves in the wild, they just enjoy getting a treat or two from the suckers who inhabit the various lodges.

Discovering that the site here plays host to wild cats was one of the strangest things. I don't think I had ever seen a wild cat prior to coming here a few years back, but apparently there are so many on the site that it's a bit of a problem at times, as you can probably imagine. Non-domesticated cats have a tendency to breed, after all, and cats are pretty good predators at the best of times, so one can imagine that it's easy to throw a delicate natural balance out of whack if the population explodes too much.

Thus, it's unsurprising to see that at least some of the wild cats here show signs of if not having been "domesticated" as such, then at least kept under control somewhat. A particularly persistent (and seemingly well-fed) one that kept paying us a visit today had a clipped ear, for example, which suggests at the very least that she exists on someone's records somewhere, and likely has been neutered in an attempt to keep the population under control.

Is that really "natural balance" if humanity has to intervene in that way? Perhaps not, but the very nature of the site has already thrown the natural balance out of things somewhat out of whack anyway, so I suspect the most sensible thing to do is at least attempt to compensate for such things as best we know how. I do not know a thing about how one goes about such things, but I'm sure there are men with graphs and flipcharts who have calculated things very effectively at some point in the management process of this whole place.

Anyway, my point is: it is nice to be able to open your curtains and see a deer, or a squirrel, or a jay, or a cat. They all seem to be having a thoroughly lovely time, and I'm not about to stop them doing so.

Meanwhile, we're hanging in here, just about. The animal friends are helping a bit.

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#oneaday Day 733: Distractions

Today we went to the swimming pool, the central attraction of most Center Parcs sites. We had a good time having a little swim in the nice warm outdoor "Sprudel pool" and sitting stewing in the outdoor jacuzzi for a bit. For the rest of the day, we've been trying to relax as best we can: eating good food, watching the wildlife out of the window, and in my case, finally getting around to replaying Ace Attorney: Trials & Tribulations in its Nintendo Switch incarnation. The last time I played this, it was on DS, so it's nice to play it on the big screen.

Pic, again, unrelated, but I thought you might like to see a deer.

The distractions have been good and welcome, but it's still tough, I don't think either of us will deny that. But we are at least managing to have a reasonably good time while we're away, which is the important thing. In some respects it might even be a good thing that we don't hear anything while we're away, as it means that the worst hasn't happened — or if it has, no-one has found him as yet. That means, I like to think, that he's still out there somewhere, waiting to be found — or perhaps just waiting to wander his way back one day and saunter in as if nothing had happened.

Stranger things have happened, as I've said a few times before; cats are well-known for their independence, after all, and even my beloved family pet from when I was a child disappeared for six whole weeks once, apparently. I don't remember this at all; I guess I must have been too young to remember when it happened. I do remember the time she got hit by a car and fled into a bush in a nearby field; we managed to track her down, get her to the vet, and she eventually made a full recovery, going on to live a very long, full and happy 17 years of life.

But still. As I keep saying, it almost doesn't bear thinking about right now, as far away from the situation as we are in physical terms. And I think we are slowly coming to terms with various unfortunate truths… or at least possibilities. None of them are particularly nice possibilities to contemplate, and thinking about them too much still upsets the both of us… but we are, gradually, bit by bit, able to get through each day without becoming completely non-functional.

It remains to be seen how we'll be when we get back, of course, depending on what — if anything — has transpired in the meantime. I feel like the best case scenario at this point is that he's found wandering around somewhere, taken to a vet, gets his microchipped scanned (which will immediately flag him both as missing and as living with us) and will thus be able to return to us safe and sound. But that is, I am aware, a very optimistic hope for how this will all end up.

I guess there's no point wondering "what if". The human brain doesn't work that way, however; the human brain, it seems, is uniquely designed to wonder "what if" as much as possible, as often as possible. And it's a function that, at least in my brain, it's near-impossible to turn off.

Still. It's the end of another day and, as always, we continue. Tomorrow is yet another day, and it remains to be seen what it will bring.

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